


a temporary silence

by almadeamla



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-02-19 02:30:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22903750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almadeamla/pseuds/almadeamla
Summary: There were few things in town he was qualified for. His experience was with his hands, with his own quiet sensibilities. He would make a master of the land and the animals that roamed it. Brokeback Mountain AU.
Relationships: Andrea/Shane Walsh, Lori Grimes/Rick Grimes, Rick Grimes/Shane Walsh
Comments: 51
Kudos: 26





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Book_Wyrm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Book_Wyrm/gifts).



> For Book_Wrym. Who has always wanted Rick/Shane cowboys. I started this fic years and years ago but won't ever be able to devote it the time proper it deserves. But I think it might do well as a drabble series.

Rick found the job advertised in the local paper. He was eight months into his engagement with Lori Calloway, a town girl he’d met, watered down by the smoke taste of whiskey, and never quite managed to forget. He loved her, much as a man could love a woman, love anything outside the indomitable forces of nature, sun rising over the mountains and sweet wind rustling the valleys, but he wasn’t a man to settle. He’d seen his father, worked down to his bone and mettle, nothing of his own to show for it. Rick didn’t want that same desperation. He wanted something greater. But he loved Lori and so he started looking for honest work. Her Pa wouldn’t agree to pay for the wedding until Rick earned himself enough for a down payment. Rick thought the arrangement more than respectable. He could appreciate a man looking out for his own.

The job asked for sheepherders. Cattle or herding experience. Good with horses. Man who had spent time outdoors. Rick had an interest in those things, had spent long summers in his backyard thinking of the possibilities. He’d tasted early morning dew from the meadows in his dreams.

Rick plucked his hat off the table of his one room apartment and headed out. He didn’t have the luxury of time. There were few things in town he was qualified for. His experience was with his hands, with his own quiet sensibilities. He would make a master of the land and the animals that roamed it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm so drunk im sorry for this.

Shane Walsh was a chatty sonofabitch. Not a man Rick would have thought suited to a life out on the prairie. Too attracted to booze and women. Not a man borne from the mountains, the steep cliff sides etched into his face.

Shane brought a flask out of his jacket pocket. Third of the week. The same smooth glass metal. Shane ladled out the beans and cornbread and offered up Rick a share of his libations.

“Don’t drink,” Rick said, tucking into his rations. He could taste the year Shane spent out among the Mexicans in California. The spice of the tomato and black pepper mixed with meat. “Never had much taste for it.”

Shane shrugged and tipped the flask back. Mouth wet, pink lipped. He bore the heat of the refracted fire. “You’ll get there,” he said.

“Hmm.” Rick didn’t think much of drinking men. His father had never touched more than a beer, not in the years Rick had known him. A glass of champagne at weddings, a toast on holidays, the proper way. “You from ‘round these parts?” Shane had the feel of a big city boy. His penchant for gossip, the slick way he hitched his horse in the early morning, too commercial in his way.

“Nah,” Shane crumbled his corner piece of cornbread. “From a little town south of here.”

“Thought you’d try your luck in a different venture?”

“Was something of a rodeo star in my hometown.” Shane’s white moon smile, cold and distant. Rick could not gauge the feeling in it.

“Why ain’t you still there then? Winner of the rodeo circuit beats freezing it out here.”

Shane’s smile now, smaller, something secret. “Got myself into a bit of trouble. Figured I was do for a change.”


	3. Chapter 3

The season came alive in the high mountains. The lush of the valley, watered green with snowmelt, budded with bunches of yellow flowers. The sheer granite cliffs had the deep blue color of glaciers. Rick fancied it a picture taken from a postcard his mother might have sent him.

His horse, a brown mare, seemed to not be broken. She kicked and whinnied at him when he went to mount her, though she had her moments of gentleness. At the end of the day, after the ride up from the valley, he would take her silken face in his hands and talk to her, tell her the good she’d done, the work she would do tomorrow, how he’d saved her his morning sugar. She ate it slow, like she knew it was for savoring, and allow him to brush her down.

  
Shane rode the silver stallion Rick had wanted for himself. He’d given up that dream after a full day of failing to get a saddle across the stallion’s back, Shane doubled over in howling laughter. The stallion was too wild, a beast from the before era, when the lands were empty of everything but buffalo and the Indians. He delighted in being ridden hard. Rick would find the two of them in the pale gray sunrise, horse and master, moving in tandem. Shane in his sleep shorts, shirt open, riding bareback, feral as the stallion between his thighs, their mouths open and panting.

  
Rick ached to see a man so free.

  
Shane joined him by the fire. Grinning. “Coffee on?”

  
“Help yourself.” He passed his tin cup to Shane. They’d taken to sharing, most mornings. Saved on washing. “I’ll see you at sundown.” Shane would take shift then, the midnight hours, watching the flock sleep in the pale gleam of moon.

  
He found a sheep dead in the meadow. The rest of the flock convalesced around it. Rick was taken aback by its hollowness, how little there was left inside. The guts had been devoured, even the stringy tendons and offal not fit for a dog’s consumption. There was nothing but a shell of carcass and a smear of red in the tender spring grass. Their first loss of the season. Too many more and it would be more than the flock the coyotes were stealing—it would be their livelihood.  
  



	4. Chapter 4

Shane came up for breakfast quiet, mouth open like a gasping trout. His hair was wet from a wash in the river. The cold brought out the man in you, hit you in the chest with its full force, like the blowback from a rifle, gripping you to your core. Rick had seen Shane emerge from the water, skin pebbled, shivering, every muscle in his body strained, trying to hold tight to its heat and keep warm.

  
Shane had blood down the front of his navy shirt. He’d been clean when he went down for washing. Rick stood up to check him for injury, but Shane shook his head. He looked all consternation and grief. Rick poured Shane a cup of coffee, ladled him some egg and bean mush, waited for him to speak.

  
“Lost another sheep.” Shane stared into his coffee. Rick could see his face reflected in it, the dark surface warped like a quivering mirror. Shane’s eyes, black as the roasted beans.

  
“Figured as much.” Small losses were expected. Sickness. An ewe wasting away after the loss of a lamb. Coyotes always took a few. But this was the tenth head in as many days. Their pay and Rick’s wedding and Shane’s big dreams of starting new depended on it. “Mr. Greene warned us about the coyotes.” He hadn’t spent much time out in the woods himself. But he’d seen the coyotes on early mornings. They flitted across residential streets like shadows. They preyed on wandering cats, the little brown wild rabbits. Coyotes were a nuisance that could grow big and grow bold. These mountain ones weren’t the same anemic little dogs he’d shot at with his slingshot. These were full, fur richly colored, brown and gray and white and red, still thickly coated after the cold of winter. They sang in the moonlight, yipped and groaned. To Rick it was a mockery, even this we will take from you, and he was resolved to end it, the only way he knew. “You get it?”

  
Shane was a crack shot. Better than Rick. Could have made himself a living with his rifle. Seemed that he had, doing showman feats with it at the rodeo, shooting targets astride a galloping horse.

  
“Got something,” Shane whispered, and Rick didn’t like the grit in his voice. The white in his knuckles.

  
“Shane?” Didn’t want to prod but had to. It was his ass and his livelihood. Shane was wrecked, he could see it, didn’t have his wits to him, and Rick remembered being that way once after a cougar had jumped out at him when he took his horse to get watered the weekend his Pa took him out riding. Pa had shot it, midair, but he’d still gotten that heaviness in his stomach, still had nightmares about it for near two weeks after, saw those claws and those huge paws and those teeth. A boy of twelve was too old for night terrors, and Pa, seeing the fit it had sent Rick into, never took him out again.

  
Rick wanted to know about Shane’s cougar.

  
“Was a man, I think.” Shane set his tin cup of coffee down beside his untouched plate. “I noticed the flock runnin’ from somethin’. Got myself down there and found the sheep. Just had to follow the blood.” Shane paused. Rick didn’t know if he wanted him to continue. Shane was a natural with a story, same as with a rifle. He wouldn’t speak so ominously without cause. “He was kneelin’ over it, had its guts all over him. He was eatin’ it, man, goin’ through the coils of intestines like they was sausage. Didn’t have a gun on him or nothing. He killed it and got it open with his hands.”

  
Rick pictured it: the red, the fat and gristle of raw meat, the sheep split wide open. Only thing he couldn’t see was the man attached to it, the man rooting through its innards in search of food.

  
“You sure ‘bout that?” He didn’t want Shane to be. He wanted Shane to take it back. “There’s a reason Injuns called the coyotes tricksters.”

  
“Weren’t no coyote,” Shane said softly, hands tight around his gun. “Shot him in the leg, but that sonovabitch kept comin’.” Shane’s fingers trembled, but his face was tight. His eyes were shadowed under the brim of his hat. “Took a headshot to bring him down. Ain’t never seen no man like that.”

  
Shane had murdered. Take a man’s life over livestock. They said a man had a right to defend what was his, and Rick was prepared to defend himself and their flock from rustlers. But a man so starved he couldn’t wait long enough to start a fire for cooking—that was a charge too steep.

  
“You killed him?” He stepped back, toward the horses. He reached down to upholster his gun.

  
“He was like an animal.” Shane stared at the ground. He wouldn’t look at Rick, wrung his hands into fists, twisted his fingers. “Tried to get me with his teeth. Didn’t—” Shane stopped and Rick had to reconsider just what kind of man he’d thought Shane Walsh would be. Ranch hand or rodeo star, maybe. Never murderer. “Didn’t seem alive.”

  
It was another week until supplies came. Rick could defend himself if he had to. If he wasn’t left with much choice.

  
“I’ll go out with the sheep from now on,” he said after a moment of consideration. Times like this called for pragmatism. For a man who knew what was needed and took the steps to make it happen. For a man to put aside his own wants and lead. “You mind camp.”

  
Shane nodded, swallowed. His throat tightened like he was working down a mouthful of corn meal. Shane accepted it for what it was: demotion. He knew Rick didn’t want him down in the valley with his gun. Rick wanted him here, holed up where he could bother nothing.

  
A week. Then he could tell Daryl about it when he brought them up the next week’s rations.

  
A week and the law could take care of Shane.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there were zombies.


	5. Chapter 5

Solitude hardened a man. Carved him like a river wore down stone, built him tough. Rick reveled in his lonesome. He’d seen Shane now twice in as many days. Quick, just stopping in for rations. Rick preferred it that way. He slept out in the open, as nature intended. The night sky, the bright diamond constellations, the enamel moon, were more vivid than Navajo tapestry. This, oh this, the beauty cold and untouching, it made a man free.

  
Morning. The chill of the night ascending, burnt out by the rising sun. Rick rose too, the sheep bleating greetings in the valley, and steadied himself for the ride to base camp. To see Shane, big eyed like Rick was the villain here, not the poor soul making good with a murderer. It was a relief to not have to crawl into his bedroll in the tent, the smell of Shane in the shared blankets. In the meadow his thinking was clear.

  
Shane wasn’t alone when Rick crested the hill. A man sat with him beside the fire. Shane had poured the stranger a cup of coffee.

  
“Can I help you?” Rick asked, dismounting. The stranger didn’t look dangerous, his round face smiling. He had mud on his boots, grass stains on the knees of his clothing. His hands were calloused, worn from work and rope. An honest man, not some big city camper or cheating rustler. Another man who made his living from the earth.

  
The stranger paused, said something to Shane, quiet, in Mexican, then he said, to Rick, “Lost sheep.”

  
Shane, freshly roused, in his sleep shorts, his shirt open, said “Morales and his buddies have a flock of their own a couple miles down. About a dozen sheep wandered off some nights back, they’re looking for ‘em. Said he ain’t seen one of his compadres, Otis, in a few days, was wondering if he could check our flock.”

  
“Reckon so.”

  
Shane dressed and the three of them rode out to pasture together. Shane spoke fluent Mexican, easy in his way about it, sounding not dissimilar from Morales, the two of them back and forth. A thourough inspection of the flock didn’t find his missing sheep.

  
Shane and Morales shook hands. “Ándale pues,” Shane said to Morales, and they watched him head out, back to tend to his own duties. Rick had flirted with the idea of warning him, letting it known there was a killer here on the mountain, but Rick was worried about vigilante justice. It was the law’s job to decide what to make of Shane. 

  
“You speak good Mexican,” Rick said. Close as he felt comfortable coming to paying Shane a compliment. 

  
“Didn’t learn English ‘til I started school.” Shane kept his eyes on Morales, a tiny shape on the horizon, a dark fleck blending into the trees. “Ma’s a Delgado, grew up in Texas. Family had land there, some cattle, since before the war.”

  
Rick nodded. “You should be heading back to camp.”

  
“Yeah, man.” A lock of Shane’s hair, the curl up high on his forehead, rustled in the wind. He looked so young. More boy than a man of nineteen. “Whatever you say.”

  
It wasn’t until evening, the moon high in its precupice, Rick crouched beside the corpse of the wild snarling thing that, just that same morning, had been Morales, the world too cruel and bloody, that he felt young himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are getting closer to more gay I promise.
> 
> Also had Rick refer to Spanish as “Mexican” because this is set in the vague 1950s/60s or whatever. And, in my experience, as a Latina, I get asked if I speak “Mexican” fairly often from older people, so.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Getting close to the gay stuff now. Promise.

Rick spent a long, cold night beneath the white stone moon. Morales’ body kept company beside him. Rick looked to the aching sky, his chest full and heavy, tears prickling beneath his eyelids, and knew he’d feel no pain greater. He’d thought, after seeing how Shane was affected, that Shane’s grief was a failure of his constitution, a just killing a man could feel good about, that was what Rick had seen in his favorite pictures. Now the harsh truth of it was apparent--to shoot a man, even one come wild at you, was to shoot yourself. The pain of that bullet never left you. It lodged itself in your gut.

He rode to camp in the thin light of daybreak. His mare was spooked, be it from the smell of blood or death or gunpowder. She was eager to be out of that valley and went straight to Shane’s open hands, whinnying.

“Hush girl,” Shane said, low. He leaned in so their noses were touching and they stared at one another, two beasts breathing, the hay and coffee smell of their breaths mingling sweetly, dark hair gleaming with sun. “You’re safe,” Shane murmured, stroking the dip of skin on her forehead, “a river don’t rise more than it can handle. It’ll swell and flood, but it ends up back the same.”

Rick came undone, too yellow for Shane's simple kindness, and the tears that had plagued him in the moonlight erupted out. He sank to his knees; it was an ugly sight, a grown man weeping, worse than finding a cow tore up by dogs, lowing to be put out of her misery. Rick hid his face in his bloodied hands to spare Shane from having to see his shame.

Sobbing, he listened to the sound of Shane freeing his mare from her bridle. Slowly he undid her saddle. He brought her to the trough for water and she drank a long time.

The sun had risen proper when Rick was finished. He felt the heat of it beating down upon him, drying the already stiff blood on his hands to dust. He smelled the hot metal of his father’s Ford in the summer, the tang of his mother’s collection of pre-war pennies. He kept his eyes shut, unsure how he was to reconcile with Shane or himself.

“Here.” Shane crouched in front of him. He had a basin of water. Without waiting, or asking, he dipped a rag into the basin and began to rub it along Rick’s hands. “Shirt might not be a loss,” Shane said, his voice even, the same tone he used when he had to talk down a horse. “Take it off and we can soak it in the creek.” Shane’s dark eyes, liquid black, like ink and coffee, took in the whole, awful sight of him, and didn’t blink.

“Shane, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Shane said, leaving Rick to finish his own washing. When he returned, he had a shovel in his hands. “Being sorry don’t change much of anything.”

Rick stood. He felt some lighter, cleaner. The pain that had burrowed its way into his rib cage had lessened enough he could live with it. He thought again of the cougar, the snarl of its teeth, claws sharper than knives, and wished as a boy he had known there were greater things to be afraid of.


End file.
